BUILDING THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
Values of Religious Pluralism
By Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit working to build mutual respect and pluralism among religiously diverse young people by empowering them to work together to serve others. He also is the author of "Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation."



The Sunday after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, I stopped by a mosque on the northwest side of Chicago for the midday prayer. Muslims gather for congregational worship on Friday, while other days of the week are generally quiet at mosques, so I was surprised that it was difficult to find a parking space. And, as this particular mosque tends to be frequented by South Asian Muslims, I was even more taken aback to see so many white, black and East Asian people gathering outside its door.

I went inside to ask one of the mosque officials what was going on. "These people are all from Christian and Jewish groups in the city," he said, "and they've been reading reports about how mosques in Chicago are being vandalized and Muslims harassed. They know how difficult it has become for us after the attacks. They're here for solidarity."

I found a familiar face amid the crowd, a friend who worked for a group called the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and had brought a few dozen people to the mosque that morning. "An attack on one community is a threat to the values we all share," she told me. "As a Jew and an American, I felt like I had to be here today."

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, government officials were explicit and forceful in stating that any aggression against Muslims would not be tolerated. President George W. Bush said harassment of Muslims was a violation of American ideals and would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. A few days after the attacks, he made a very public visit to a mosque in Washington, D.C., and spoke favorably about Islam and proudly about America's tradition of tolerance.

But no president, mayor or general had ordered these people to come to the Muslim Community Center on this beautiful Sunday. I was witnessing civil society in action-the principles of a country being made real by the deeds of its citizens. I included in my prayer that morning an offer of thanks that I live in a nation that cherishes and protects its pluralism. In a world where people from different backgrounds come into contact more frequently and intensely than ever before, and in a time when the forces of division are powerful and deadly, it is precisely this tradition of pluralism that may be America's most precious resource and most important gift.

America and the Faith Line

One hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois famously said, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." From the civil rights movement in America to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the question of how people from different racial backgrounds should come together was a defining feature of the past 100 years. While the voices of both white supremacists and black nationalists were loud, it was visionaries such as Martin Luther King Jr., who gave new meaning to DuBois' color line and provided hope for a collective future. King famously believed that the color line did not divide black and white, or red and yellow, but those who wanted to live together as brothers and those who would perish together as fools.

While we are shamefully far from genuine harmony and equality between different races, even a cursory reading of today's newspapers indicates that the 21st century may be defined by a different divide-what I call "the faith line." From Northern Ireland to South Asia, from the Middle East to West Africa, people are fighting, killing and dying in the name of God. And while there are many people who would have us believe that the faith line separates Christians and Hindus or Jews and Muslims, I believe that we would do well to learn from the perspective of King and understand the faith line as dividing not different groups, but different visions: in this case, the vision of religious pluralists versus the vision of religious totalitarians.

On one side of the faith line are the religious totalitarians. Their conviction is that only one interpretation of one religion is a legitimate way of being, believing and belonging on Earth. Everyone else needs to be cowed, converted, condemned or killed. Religious totalitarians are not marked by conservative, traditionalist or orthodox religious beliefs. Rather, they are defined by their behavior, driven by the goal of having their group dominate while everyone else suffocates.

On the other side of the faith line are the religious pluralists. Pluralists hold that people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. Religious pluralism is neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus. It is a form of proactive cooperation that affirms the identity of the constituent communities, while emphasizing that the well-being of each and all depends on the health of the whole. It is the belief that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its own unique contribution.

A 21st Century City on a Hill

America is the most religiously devout society in the West and the most religiously diverse nation in the world, in an era of global religious conflict. We stand at the crossroads of the most profound crisis currently facing humanity. Virtually every religious and ethnic community in the world is represented in America, including ones that are at war elsewhere. We need to be deliberate and strategic about building religious pluralism, a value that has been very much a part of our past and that we need to strengthen for our future.

One of the most enduring images of America comes from John Winthrop, who sailed across the Atlantic in 1630 and told his compatriots:

"We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together . for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all the people are upon us."

Winthrop's city on a hill has three key components: community, faith and influence. Winthrop called for a society where people take care of one another. He spoke not of a legal framework but of an ethos; not of how government should function but about what civil society should value; and not of the powers of the state but of the actions of citizens. With the city on a hill image taken from the Bible, there's no doubt Winthrop imagined his city with a steeple in the center, which he believed was the key institution to impart the values central to creating a good society.

A century and a half later, when America was beginning to take shape, men such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin debated the role that religion should play in the public life of the nation. By the standards of the age, America was already a religiously diverse nation at the time of the Revolutionary War. One study of religion in America indicated that in 1776 there were thriving communities of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Lutherans and Catholics living within the nation's borders. There were even a handful of Jewish synagogues in America at that time.

Our founding fathers had a range of personal views on religion, but they all agreed that the central values governing the role of religion in public life should be freedom and pluralism. Madison spoke forcefully about the relationship between these two values: "Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest." Washington sent a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I., in 1790, stating to his Jewish countrymen that America "gives . bigotry no sanction." Franklin was involved in the building of a church in Philadelphia that gave a pulpit to the fire-and-brimstone evangelist George Whitefield-a man so ridiculed by the religious establishment that he was preaching in the fields.

The British writer G.K. Chesterton once noted that America is a nation with the soul of a church. Indeed, while much of Europe has not only become less religious but downright suspicious of faith, America has remained a remarkably devout country. According to the World Values Survey (1999-2000), 94 percent of Americans say they believe in God, compared with only 50 percent of Germans, 56 percent of the French and 61 percent of the English.

But the soul of America has expanded far beyond the symbol of a church. Today, there are about 6 million Jews in America, between 3 million and 4 million Buddhists, nearly a million Hindus, and perhaps as many as 6 million Muslims. This is what scholar Diana Eck explains as a "Christian country" becoming the most religiously diverse nation in the world.

To return to Winthrop's image of the city on a hill with a steeple at the center, we must now imagine that steeple surrounded by the minarets of Muslim mosques, the Hebrew script of Jewish synagogues, the chanting of Buddhist sanghas and the intricately carved statues of Hindu temples. The question for America and its newfound religious diversity is whether we can create the same type of nurturing community that Winthrop initially imagined. If the steeple, the synagogue, the mosque, the sangha and the temple "delight in each other, make others' conditions [their] own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together," America can be a 21st-century city on a hill to a world at war over religion.

Martin Luther King Jr., the World House and the Beloved Community

Martin Luther King Jr., thought this not only a possibility, but a necessity. We are accustomed to thinking of King as only a race hero, and certainly he did more than any other American to address the problem of the color line. But King's approach wasn't exclusive to race; it included race in a larger, more radical vision of new relationships-a vision best described as pluralism. In "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community," King wrote, "The great new problem of mankind [is that] we have inherited ... a great 'world house' in which we have to live together-black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu. Because we can never again live apart, we must somehow learn to live with each other in peace."

King understood interfaith cooperation as a central part of this larger vision of pluralism. It is a view that King came to through his personal experiences with religious diversity. King was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. King, only 26 years old at the time, was called on to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association and to take on the challenge of desegregating Montgomery's public transportation system.

Raised in a deeply religious Baptist family, King had always believed in Jesus' teachings to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies," but he felt this ethic was useful only in individual relationships and ineffective as a methodology for social change. It was Gandhi's application of the Hindu concept of satyagraha-literally, "love force"-in the movement to free India that convinced King that active pacifism was a powerful instrument for reform.

King said that "Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique for nonviolent social change," and called Gandhi "the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective force on a large scale."

From Gandhi, King took not only the idea of the relevance of creative nonviolence but also the lesson that different religious communities should cooperate together in the pursuit of justice. Studying Gandhi was only the first step in King's interfaith journey. In 1959, King traveled to India to learn more about Gandhi's life and work. King was deeply moved by the spirituality and religious diversity of India. In one of his first sermons in Montgomery after returning from India, King offered the following prayer: "O God, our gracious heavenly father. We call you this name. Some call thee Allah, some call you Elohim. Some call you Jehovah, some call you Brahma." This is a remarkable statement for any place at any time, but for a Baptist church in a Deep South city in 1959, it was nothing short of radical.

King was influenced not only by the philosophies of different religious traditions but also by his friendships with people of different faiths. In Chicago in 1963, King met Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, an Orthodox Jew from Eastern Europe who had barely escaped Hitler's death camps. In King, Heschel saw an American working in the prophetic tradition, a kind of Moses figure leading his people to freedom. In Heschel, King found a partner in the belief that religion should unite humankind against social evil. The two walked arm-in-arm in the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

Later, Heschel wrote, "Our march was worship. I felt like my legs were praying." It is a concrete example of how people from different religions worked together to create a better America.

In addition to ushering in the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, King's leadership also helped pass the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened America's doors to large communities of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists-and helped make America "a world house." Religious communities working together were central to making that vision a reality, precisely because of the social values they shared. The most important of these values, for King, was love. In his sermon "A Time to Break Silence," King said, "The Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality ... is that the force of love is the supreme unifying principle of life."

Building Pluralism in America

The Holy Quran says that "God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another." It is a statement that deeply resonates with America's fundamental value of pluralism. Unfortunately, there is an enormous amount of fear and suspicion about Muslims in America, a phenomenon that some scholars are calling "Islamophobia."

In the world of media and books, Muslims are increasingly portrayed as a potential fifth column, a threat that lives next door. Commentators like Daniel Pipes spread crazy notions like "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," whereby your normal Muslim neighbor who works at the local insurance company goes berserk and murders you in your driveway. Books by former Muslims that blame Islam for everything bad in their lives and the world become best-sellers by providing an "insider's account" of the evils of the faith. Prominent anchors like CNN's Glenn Beck claim to speak for the masses when he challenges U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who happens to be Muslim-American: "Prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."

Their fear-mongering is having an impact. A 2006 Gallup Poll found serious prejudice against Muslims. About 40 percent of Americans admit to feeling bias against Muslims, and about the same number support increased security measures applicable only to Muslims, such as carrying a special identity card.

In this climate, the fear that Muslim-Americans, and many government officials, live with is this: How bad will the backlash be in the event of another terrorist attack, regardless of whether the perpetrators are part of the Christian identity movement or al-Qaeda?

In 2007, the Pew Research Center released a report that found that Muslims in America were "largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world."

In other words, a largely immigrant community distinguished by its religious belief is attempting to enfranchise itself in this nation through the age-old methods of hard work and patriotic commitment, and an industry of people has emerged to block their progress by speciously linking them with criminals who happen to share a part of their identity. As the Jewish leader in the example at the beginning noted, when one community is threatened based on its religious background, the very value of religious pluralism in our society is at risk.

Here are steps we can take toward achieving the goal of religious pluralism today:

1. Articulate a framework that assumes communities have a contribution to make to the common good.
A century ago, Du Bois articulated what it felt like to be black in America with the following line: "How does it feel to be treated like a problem?" When people feel treated this way, they often become defensive and feel alienated from the main structures of that society. Certain elements might develop an oppositional identity, which is clearly what is happening with parts of the Muslim community in Europe. In America, we must leverage our open, immigrant and multicultural heritage and set this ideal of pluralism as an aspiration for the future as well.

2. Promote understanding of the shared values between different traditions.
In his important book "Religious Literacy," scholar Steven Prothero notes that Americans are a highly religiously devout people but not a particularly religiously knowledgeable nation. We need to inculcate a greater understanding of the world's religions in a manner that is neither abstract nor boring but is instead consistent with what religion scholar Huston Smith calls "religion alive." The best way to achieve this is to educate people about the social-action values religious traditions share-values that include compassion, justice, love and tolerance-and to highlight the historical movements and contemporary examples of religious communities achieving these values together. I suggest starting with Martin Luther King Jr.

3. Provide more opportunities for Americans of all religious backgrounds to come to know one another personally.
A March 2006 Pew report states that of Americans who do not know a Muslim, only 50 percent have a positive view of the Muslim community. But of respondents who said they did know a Muslim personally, 74 percent claim to have a positive perception. Often, people come to know one another in civic organizations. Americans are remarkably good at building civic organizations, from Little League baseball teams to PTAs to volunteer projects. In the past, such organizations helped bring together people from different racial backgrounds. We Americans now need to use these civic associations to bring people from different faiths together so they get to know each other.

4. Directly engage young people.
Acts of religious violence abroad as well as religious hate crimes in the United States are overwhelmingly committed by young people. However, conferences on interfaith cooperation are generally attended by older people. If we are to be effective in building a society that is characterized by interfaith understanding, youths will have to play a leading role. This means that institutions where young people learn their values-schools, universities and religious communities, for example-will have to promote the importance of interfaith understanding.

The Interfaith Youth Core

I remember watching President Bill Clinton's inaugural address in January 1993 and thinking, as a high school senior in the Western suburbs of Chicago, that I was witnessing something new in American history: a new generation assuming leadership; a new engagement with the world; a new philosophy taking root; and a new belief in active citizenship. I wanted desperately to be a part of it.
As the Clinton administration engaged in foreign policy challenges from Belfast to the Balkans, from South Asia to the Middle East, I noticed that an animating dimension of each of these conflicts was religion. I saw President Clinton's AmeriCorps program bring together young people from different racial, ethnic and class backgrounds to solve problems in American cities and communities. I realized that most of the people on the front lines of religious conflicts were young, and at the same time I knew that most of the faith heroes who had worked for social justice and pluralism-Gandhi, King, Jane Addams and the Dalai Lama-were in their teens and 20s when they took leadership. Putting all these factors together, I envisioned an international movement of youths whose purpose was to serve others based on their unique religious traditions. And because the spirit of America during the Clinton years was one of possibility and responsibility, of idealism and action, I decided to start that organization.

From the glimmer of an idea in 1998, the Interfaith Youth Core is now an organization with a multimillion-dollar budget. It has had a presence on six continents, involved tens of thousands of religiously diverse young people in interfaith service projects and brought its message of religious pluralism to millions. In 2005, President Clinton invited me to speak about the importance of youth leadership in building religious pluralism at the first Clinton Global Initiative meeting.

Standing on the stage with President Clinton, looking out at the audience of social entrepreneurs, leading philanthropists and heads of state, I could not help but think of those moments when I have witnessed people of different backgrounds choosing to build bridges of understanding rather than live in bubbles of isolation. Those are the moments that give me hope that we are on the edge of a new era of religious pluralism.